I first met Dan Bern in the early 1980s. Dan was playing a coffeehouse at Elgin Community College in Elgin, Illinois and my family went to see him, just by chance. Turned out to be a pretty good bit of luck. After his performance was over, we took him out to eat at an all-night Shoney's Big Boy, where his stream of consciousness conversation and jello-snarfing skills entertained the hell out of us while at the same time annoying the restaurant staff. You can't buy that kind of fun!

After that we made a point of seeing Dan play whenever we could, and had him out to our house several times for dinner. In 1985 I arranged for Dan to perform at Northern Illinois University. I was a lousy organizer, so not many people showed up, but Dan put on a hell of a good show for the few who did attend. Some of the MP3 files here come from a tape I made directly off the sound board at that show. The same week at NIU, Dan perfomed outdoors in the mall area, and played a song about the nuclear power plant in Byron Illinois as part of a public discussion on nuclear energy at the student center. He wrote the song on the bus on the way to NIU from Chicago.

When he performed at NIU, Dan lived in my dorm room for a long weekend, and we spent the time eating lots of pizza and playing guitar, which was quite an experience. A lot of my guitar style (and play list) after that time was heavily influenced by Dan.

My family and I eventually lost track of Dan after he moved from Chicago to California, and I didn't hear anything about him until 1996 when I ran into some other Dan fans on the Internet. It's great to find that Dan is finally getting the recognition that he deserves, even if people keep trying to put him in too-small boxes, and it's nice to know that we were right when we recognized a great talent.

MP3 files from my own recordings

Photographs and scans and stuff